Returning to Schenectady, I found that the family had begun to discuss the future of my career, which had arrived at the point of divergences.  My father, who had no opinion of the utility of advanced education for boys in our station, was tenacious in his intention to have me in his workshop, where he needed more apprentices, but my mother was still more obstinate in hers that I should have the education; and in the decision the voices of my brothers were too potent not to hold the casting vote.  In the stern, Puritanical manner of the family, I had been more or less the enfant gate of all its members, except my brother Paul, the third of my brothers, who, coming into the knowledge of domestic affairs at the time when the family was at its greatest straits, had expressed himself bitterly at my birth, over the imprudence of our parents’ increasing their obligations when they were unable to provide for the education of the children they had already, and had always retained for me a little of the bitterness of those days.  On the whole, the vote of the family council was for the education.  My own wishes were hardly consulted, for I differed from both opinions, having an intense enthusiasm for art, to which I wished to devote myself.

The collective decision, in which my father and myself were alike overruled, was that I should go to Union College, in Schenectady, as the collegiate education was supposed to be a facilitation for whatever occupation I might afterwards decide on.  This was, so far as I was concerned, a fatal error, and one of a kind far too common in New England communities, where education is estimated by the extent of the ground it covers, without relation to the superstructure to be raised on it.  I had always been a greedy reader of books, and especially of histories and the natural sciences,—­everything in the vegetable or animal world fascinated me,—­and I had no ambition for academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest—­the years when, if ever, the artist is made.

That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or sequence.  It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is so